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    Trump Considers Executive Order on College Athlete Payments

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    College athletes have signed deals worth millions of dollars since the N.C.A.A. allowed student-athletes to become paid endorsers.President Trump is considering an executive order to examine payments made to college athletes and whether they have created an unfair system, two people briefed on the matter said Friday.Mr. Trump’s focus on the issue — which he’s talked about in the past, one of the people briefed on the matter noted — was renewed after he spoke with Nick Saban, the famed former University of Alabama football coach, backstage at an event Thursday night in Tuscaloosa, where Mr. Trump delivered an address to graduates.The Wall Street Journal first reported on Mr. Trump’s consideration. The two people who were briefed on it were not authorized to speak publicly.The executive order would address newly expanded opportunities for student-athletes to monetize their athletic careers. Last year, the N.C.A.A., the organization that governs much of college sports, agreed to settle a class-action antitrust lawsuit that had accused it and its member schools of exploiting student-athletes while hoarding the profits of the lucrative college sports industry.The $2.8 billion settlement, which is nearing approval, created a revenue-sharing plan for college athletics in which schools would start directly paying their athletes, a major shake-up of the college sports landscape. The N.C.A.A. has already removed restrictions on athletes monetizing their athletic careers through endorsements and sponsorships — known as “name, image and likeness” payments.The changes initiated an arms race in college athletics, as wealthy teams offered larger and larger compensation packages to lure top talent into their programs. Star players have since signed deals worth millions of dollars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dockworkers Vote to Accept New Labor Contract

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      Workers at East and Gulf Coast ports who went on strike briefly in October ratified a deal that includes a 62 percent raise over six years.Dockworkers on the East and Gulf Coasts voted in favor of a new contract on Tuesday, ending labor turbulence at ports that handle a large share of U.S. trade with the rest of the world.The dockworkers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, said nearly 99 percent of its members had supported the contract, which raises wages 62 percent over six years and guarantees jobs when employers introduce technology that can move cargo autonomously.The deal was reached after a short strike in October, the first full-scale walkout since 1977, and the intervention of two U.S. presidents.Officials from the Biden administration pushed the United States Maritime Alliance, the group representing employers, to increase its wage offer, which ended the strike and brought the I.LA. back to the bargaining table. After his election victory, Donald J. Trump backed the union, saying he supported their fight against automation.“This is an incredible contract package,” Harold J. Daggett, the president of the I.L.A., said in a statement.Dockworkers have significant leverage in contract talks because they can shut down ports, throwing supply chains into chaos. But labor experts said Mr. Daggett had bolstered the union’s cause by calling a strike and by establishing strong ties with Mr. Trump.“The only way they would have gotten a deal like this was through striking, showing that they had the economic power and, it turns out, the political power,” said William Brucher, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.All 41 members of the Maritime Alliance, a group that includes port operating companies and shipping lines, voted for the contract, which covers the roughly 25,000 longshoremen who move containers on the East and Gulf Coasts.Under the contact, hourly wages will rise to $63 in 2029, from the current $39. That is comparable to the pay for dockworkers on the West Coast, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose wages will rise to nearly $61 in 2027.With overtime and higher rates for working at night, longshoremen can earn well over $200,000 a year.The I.L.A. has long opposed the introduction of automated cranes and other machines.Like the old contract, the new one bars employers from deploying machinery that can operate at all times without a person directing its moves. The West Coast longshoremen’s union has allowed such technology — like driverless container-moving vehicles — at its ports for years.But the I.L.A.’s new contract does not stop employers from adding cranes that can at times perform tasks — like stacking containers — without direction from a human. And the new contract makes it easier for employers to introduce such cranes.Still, the union got a job guarantee that management would assign at least one worker for each additional crane. (Now, one union worker might remotely oversee and operate several cranes at once.) More

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      Democrats Need Working-Class Voters. Maybe Now They’ll Act Like It.

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      The other day I was supposed to visit a friend who had been released from prison. He had to cancel to rescue his sister, who is using drugs again.Another old friend needed a ride: It turned out that his car had broken down again, and until his next paycheck came, he couldn’t afford a $2 bolt to fix it.I think of friends like these here in rural Oregon, in an area that mostly supports Donald Trump, when people ask me why America’s working class rejected the Democrats on Tuesday. My neighbors, struggling to pay the rent and buying gas five dollars at a time, often perceive national Democrats as remote elites more eager to find them pronouns than housing. Election postmortems have been dissecting Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but the challenge for Democrats goes far beyond any of that.For several decades, voters have identified more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. But in some polls this year, more people have affiliated with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party. Looking ahead at the specific Senate seats that will be in contention in 2026 and 2028, it’s not easy to see when the Democrats will have a chance to recover the chamber.I see the disenchantment with Democrats in my hometown, Yamhill, which traditionally was dependent on timber, agriculture and light manufacturing. But then good union jobs left, meth arrived and everything changed. Today more than a third of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus are dead from drugs, alcohol, suicide and reckless accidents.Here’s an astonishing statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics data: Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are now in 2024. So today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents were 52 years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Boeing Union Workers Reject Contract

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      The vote, hours after Boeing reported a $6.1 billion loss, will extend a monthlong strike at factories where the company makes its best-selling commercial plane.Boeing’s largest union rejected a tentative labor contract on Wednesday, a blow to the aerospace manufacturer and the Biden administration, which had intervened in the hopes of ending an economically damaging strike that began more than five weeks ago.The contract, the second that workers have voted down, was defeated by a wide margin, with 64 percent of those voting opposing the deal, according to the union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The union represents about 33,000 workers, but it did not disclose how many voted on Wednesday.“This wasn’t enough for our members,” said Jon Holden, president of District 751 of the union, which represents the vast majority of the workers. “They’ve spoken loudly and we’re going to go back to the table.”The vote is a setback for Boeing’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, who is trying to restore Boeing’s reputation and business, which he described in detail earlier on Wednesday. In remarks to workers and investors, Mr. Ortberg said Boeing needed to undergo “fundamental culture change” to stabilize the business and to improve execution.“Our leaders, from me on down, need to be closely integrated with our business and the people who are doing the design and production of our products,” he said. “We need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops and in our engineering labs. We need to know what’s going on, not only with our products, but with our people.”Mr. Ortberg delivered that message alongside the company’s quarterly financial results, which included a loss of more than $6.1 billion. This month, Boeing also announced plans to cut its work force by about 10 percent, which amounts to 17,000 jobs. Boeing also recently disclosed plans to raise as much as $25 billion by selling debt or stock over the next three years as it tries to avoid a damaging downgrade to its credit rating.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Job Market Is Chugging Along, Completing a Solid Economic Picture

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      For months, the economy has been like a jigsaw with one mismatched piece: Consumer spending has been holding up and overall growth has been solid, but the job market has looked treacherously wobbly.As of Friday, the last piece of that puzzle is finally clicking into place.Fresh employment data for September showed that hiring picked up strongly, the unemployment rate dipped and wage growth came in strong last month. While it is just one report, it matches up with a number of recent signals that the economy is robust.Data revisions released last week showed that growth has been stronger and incomes have been more solid than previously understood. Retail sales data are holding up. And now, it looks as if employers are meeting resilient consumer demand by continuing to expand their workforces. In fact, the report reinforced that by many measures, the job market is as healthy as it has ever been.“The monster upside surprise suggests that the labor market may actually be a picture of strength, not weakness,” Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, wrote in a research note after the report.The fresh data is good news for both the Federal Reserve and the White House, both of which had been anxiously watching a recent tick up in the unemployment rate. When joblessness rises, it can herald a coming recession. If people are struggling to find work, they are likely to pull back on spending, which can further slow the economy.But the September data showed that unemployment ticked down to 4.1 percent, keeping it at a historically low level. And joblessness fell for Black workers, who often struggle more to find work when the economy is weakening.By several measures, hiring conditions are historically strong. People in their prime working years of 25 to 54 are employed at a rate only previously seen in the early 2000s. Average hourly earnings are strong — and climbing — even after adjusting for inflation. Women in their peak working ages are participating in the labor market at the highest levels on record.That combination is all the more notable given the economic ride that America has been on over the past four years. First, the pandemic shuttered businesses and pushed unemployment to towering heights. Then inflation took off, prodding Fed officials to sharply lift interest rates.Historically, such campaigns by the Fed have resulted in significant labor market slowdowns and even painful recessions.This time, though, the central bank appears to be on the cusp of achieving a rare soft landing, a situation in which inflation slows without causing a lot of economic pain in the process. In fact, there is no precedent in which the Fed has cooled inflation from levels as high as those reached in 2022 without incurring significant labor market costs in the process.But the fresh jobs data suggest that a gentle cooling is more than possible — it may be happening. More

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      Jobs Report Adds to Economic Momentum for Harris

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      Vice President Kamala Harris probably could not have hoped for a better run of pre-election economic data than what the United States has enjoyed over the last month, punctuated by Friday’s surprisingly strong jobs report.In recent weeks, key inflation indicators have fallen close to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate, after years of running hot under Ms. Harris and President Biden. Federal Reserve officials cut interest rates by a half-percentage point to stoke economic activity, immediately bringing mortgage rates to their lowest point in two years. The Commerce Department confirmed that the economy has grown at a robust 3 percent clip over the last year, after adjusting for rising prices. The Census Bureau reported that the typical household’s inflation-adjusted income jumped in 2023.Those numbers had encouraged Democrats, including policymakers in the White House and close to Ms. Harris’s campaign team. Recent polls have shown Ms. Harris closing the gap, or pulling even, with former President Donald J. Trump on the question of who can best handle the economy and inflation.But it was Friday’s employment report — 254,000 jobs gained, with wages growing faster than prices — that appeared to give Harris boosters a particularly large dose of confidence. The report came less than a day after striking dockworkers agreed to return to work through the end of the year, avoiding what could have been a major economic disruption with a month to go before the election.“The combination of this great job market and easing inflation is generating solid real wage and income gains,” said Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “While those continue to power this expansion forward, we’re also seeing record investment in key sectors, an entrepreneurial boom and gains in worker bargaining power to help ensure that workers get their fair share of all this growth.”Even Mr. Biden, who has attempted to strike a balance between cheering the economy’s performance and acknowledging the struggles created by years of fast-rising prices, sounded more upbeat than normal for a post-jobs-report statement.“Today, we received good news for American workers and families with more than 250,000 new jobs in September and unemployment back down at 4.1 percent,” he said.Independent economists were less cheerful. Several of them acknowledged the strong numbers but warned that they could be illusory, and that the Fed may need to continue to cut interest rates in the months to come to keep unemployment from rising.“The September jobs report is unambiguously strong,” James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING, wrote in a research note. But he immediately warned that other indicators, including Americans’ personal assessments that the job market is worsening, cloud the picture. “We feel that the risks remain skewed towards weaker growth.” More

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      in Elections

      New York Philharmonic Opens Its Season Amid Labor Talks and Troubles

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      The orchestra is working to negotiate a new contract with musicians, resolve a misconduct inquiry and hire a new chief executive.On a recent night at Lincoln Center, a group of New York Philharmonic musicians, dressed in matching black shirts and carrying union leaflets, fanned out and began to evangelize.“Support the musicians!” Thomas Smith, a trumpet player, told a crowd of concertgoers.It was one of the New York Philharmonic’s first concerts of the fall, and the musicians, in the middle of high-stake labor talks, were alerting their audience to what they hoped would be embraced as startling facts.The orchestra’s players have not had a raise since 2019, and they are paid substantially less than colleagues in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.“We need your help,” Alina Kobialka, a violinist, said as she handed out leaflets.The scene was a reminder of the stark challenges this season for the Philharmonic, which not so long ago seemed to be beginning a vibrant new chapter.The labor agreement between management and the musicians expires on Friday, only a few days before the orchestra’s opening gala, a major fund-raising event.The Philharmonic lacks a permanent president and chief executive, after the sudden resignation in July of its leader, Gary Ginstling. An investigation into sexual harassment and misconduct at the Philharmonic has dragged on. And the ensemble, which is awaiting the arrival in 2026 of the star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, has no full-time music director this season or next.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s Proposal to End Taxes on Overtime Pay Could Cost Billions

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      Former President Donald J. Trump is calling for exempting overtime pay from taxes, the latest in a string of vague tax proposals that have befuddled tax experts, worried fiscal hawks and seemingly charmed voters.Mr. Trump floated the idea this past week during a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., telling the crowd that it would supercharge incentives to work more and put money back in the pockets of many Americans.“It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break, and that’s what we’re doing because this is a good one,” he said.The pitch is part of what has become Mr. Trump’s playbook during the presidential race: tossing out potentially huge tax cuts, defined in just a few words, to try and win over middle- and working-class voters. He has also vowed to exempt tips from taxes and end taxes on Social Security benefits, two ideas that have proven popular. At the same time, he has said he would further cut the corporate tax rate.As with his promise to end taxes on tips, though, Mr. Trump left many key details about the overtime plan unaddressed, making it hard to estimate its costs. Among the open questions is whether overtime pay would be exempt from just the income tax or if the exception would also apply to the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.There is also the issue of how many Americans could benefit from Mr. Trump’s idea. More than 34 million Americans worked over 40 hours a week in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but only a subset of that group are owed time-and-a-half pay for overtime under federal law. The rules are complex, but in general Americans earning a salary of more than $43,888 a year may not be owed overtime, depending on their job. Americans paid by the hour, currently about 55 percent of the work force, are broadly eligible for overtime pay.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ending the Boeing Strike Won’t Be Easy. Here’s Why.

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      The vehemence of workers over wages and other issues caught the company and union leaders off guard.When thousands of Boeing employees rejected a new labor contract, precipitating a strike that began on Friday, they were at odds not just with management but also with the leaders of their union, who backed the proposed deal.Now, any attempt to reach an agreement must take account of the demands of the rank and file of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. What they want — significantly larger pay raises and far more lucrative retirement benefits than their leaders and Boeing agreed to — may be too much for management. But labor experts said the strength of the strike vote — 96 percent in favor — should help the union get a better deal.“Those overwhelming numbers are kind of embarrassing, certainly from a public relations standpoint for the union,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies labor at Washington University in St. Louis. “But they also simultaneously present the union with leverage when it does resume negotiations.”And Boeing is in a difficult spot after a slowdown in commercial jet production — required by regulators after a panel blew out of a passenger jet fuselage in January — led to big financial losses. A long strike at Boeing’s main production base in the Seattle area would add significantly to the losses and possibly tip its credit rating into junk territory, a chilling development for a company with nearly $60 billion in debt.The federal mediation service said on Friday that the union and Boeing management would resume talks in the coming days.“We’re going to go back to the bargaining table, and bargain for what our members deserve,” Jon Holden, the president of District 751, the part of the machinists’ union that represents most of the workers on strike, said in an interview. “We’ll push this company farther than they ever thought they’d go.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More